Dear Azami - All The Combos, All The Time

I was listening to an episode of Commandercast where there was a discussion of how the color pie has been compromised especially when it comes to what you can do in Commander. That got me thinking about white and how infamously hard it is to draw cards in white. Wouldn't it be fun/funny to build a mono-white deck that focuses on card draw? Puresteel Paladin and Mentor of the Meek are the two most recent cards that give white some draw so Kemba Kha Regent seemed like the logical general focusing on two-power creatures and equipment. Meh she's not that original though.

I thought about an Edric deck I saw where the win con was entirely based on creatures whose P/T were based on cards in hand and of course Psychosis Crawler. I was wishing I could do that in white when I found Kiyomaro First to Stand. Really? A white legend based around having a lot of cards in hand? That's ridiculous. I had to build it.

Right now the deck is just a toy with a somewhat Voltron theme using Kiyomaro. What I mean by a 'toy' is it durdles around with Salvaging Station and shenanigans with one-drop artifacts that draw cards or get me card advantage. Origin Spellbomb for example. Psychosis Crawler is here as a win con as well.

I think we need to redefine fun. You have your infinite combos but are those really fun? Cycling through to draw your whole deck's not really fun and as you've said even when you are doing that you're still just kind of durdling. It's almost as if the only benefit you obtain for drawing your whole deck is the ability to one-shot people with your Commander and that's not really an interesting benefit—more like a side effect. I want to see combos that are interesting and I want to see all of them if you are going to depart down this path. The more 'little' interactions you have the more interesting game states you're going to have because your combos will assemble themselves whether they're infinite or not.

The infinite ones aren't fun but they're not so strongly antithetical to the idea of fun that I'm going to cut into them though we're pretty close to that there. Given my pretty strongly stated reservations against unbeatable silliness it's actually pretty surprising that at the end of this I haven't gone in and removed the Ashnod's Altar to break up your ability to go 'infinite.' I'm actually okay with it based on the fact that your infinite combos rely on a small creature living in a removal-heavy format against three different opponents. If they can't kill a Mentor of the Meek or a Fiend Hunter you could say they get what they deserve.

In pursuing this deck and where it brings us I want to embrace the all-the-combos all-the-time feel you've started the thread of and just run with it like mad. We won't quite go Auriok Salvagers / Lion's Eye Diamond 'mad' but the only reason we're shying away from that is that would kill your Commander not because it suddenly wouldn't be interesting to see happen accidentally sometimes out of the spinning happy fun-ball of doom we're building your Kiyomaro deck to be.

So we're looking at 'trinkets' as an intrinsic combo piece and the ability to recur them or be enabled by them as a considerable element of the deck and I can see that going somewhere fun quite fast. You also have an equipment subtheme and we can make that a combo deck too if we try so we'll see where that goes too. I can think of more combinations that are interesting and fun to include and we'll get to them too all in good time.

It's time to take to your deck and start carving with a chainsaw. We'll begin with the lands which will hopefully give you an idea of what I mean when I say I want to see all of the combos.

OUT:

Springjack Pasture - I know of no one who tries to love this card harder than I do. Anywhere near a decklist toting significant chunks of equipment you will find me and my trusty Goat tokens. However this time around we're going to end up cutting into the equipment and are also going to add significantly to the colorless land department. So at risk of ending up with too few plains to operate Emeria the Sky Ruin comfortably this just ends up needing to get cut.

Ancient Tomb - You don't have clear benefits from the speed boost early on and if we're building for later in the game you can do considerably better with the replacement team we're adding instead.

8x Plains - I know I said we're going to have to watch out for how we operate Emeria but these being pulled out will end up being surprisingly neutral I swear.

You also just actually need another land so we've taken out ten and will be adding back eleven borrowing from another segment of the deck to pay back this addition. I know you have a lot of hidden effects that help with the mana department but having that Mox Opal not work until you cast your third artifact but needing that Mox Opal to cast your third artifact is a sticky place to find yourself. Another land will help since we must be cognizant of the fact that artifact mana sometimes just dies and can't be counted on.

IN:

Ghost Quarter - I don't want to see Maze of Ith shutting you down and you need one obligatory answer to Cabal Coffers somewhere in your deck because that's a problem that will come up consistently. Why this instead of Strip Mine when clearly it's not really a price issue will show up later. This will potentially target your own lands some of the time and if that's what is happening you'll want to get the bonus (as that's what you'd be doing it for in the first place). While this sounds cryptic for anyone who watched Pro Tour Return to Ravnica you can probably take a guess at what I'm referring to.

Thawing Glaciers - The ultimate in how to turn on Emeria on the cheap Thawing Glaciers helps ensure you actually just never run out of land drops. When you play a Thawing Glaciers early on you actually just get to draw a free card every other turn and you said you liked drawing cards so this seems an obvious decision to add it in.

Mistveil Plains - We cut a regular Plains and added a fancy one. You'll add in a wee extra bit of recursion to the deck which should help reassembling broken-up combos by recycling used parts for eventual reclamation. You have more than a few ways to do things like that and we add yet more again but this is basically a free addition.

GrasslandsFlood Plain – They're basically the same as Evolving Wilds or Terramorphic Expanse as far as you're concerned but they have the added benefit of being able to find the Mistveil Plains if you want additional access to that option. We're building in more free shuffle effects to go with your Scroll Rack—Racking and shuffling being an excellent way to hunt up disparate missing combo pieces—while giving Sun Titan something more to do while he's at it. There's additional potential cross utility as well with a few other cards but just for that would be good enough.

Naya PanoramaBant PanoramaEsper Panorama - Same idea behind Grassland and Flood Plain these trade the opportunity cost of coming into play tapped for the downside of having to be actually put to work in order to cash them in for a Plains. The benefits are significant the costs are minimal and the potential upsides from bonus interactions are very high.

Urza's TowerUrza's MineUrza's Power Plant - Remember how I said all of the combos? Assembling the Urzatron is a combo that's considerably more powerful than Ancient Tombs would be even if you have to put some elbow grease into it. That you can do so handily off any draw that starts with Weathered Wayfarer will add significantly to the power of the deck and with all the shuffling and fetching and touching your deck this will tend towards self-assembling even if you have to do it the hard way with Auriok Salvagers and a Tutored-up Expedition Map.

Moving on to the spells next we're going to move around a few pieces four out and five in which means we're going to need to pull two from other sections now. There are going to be some logical implications from the choices that you'll see in these other parts of the deck that should be pretty apparent right away...

OUT:

Return to Dust - Present as a 'good stuff' addition but not as critical to the functioning of the deck as it would first appear. While it certainly has use we're going to apply a higher standard than that to whether we play all of these cards since you need things that advance your game plans even if they aren't community consensus 'best cards' for your colors. The cards we put back in may look jankier but they'll work better for you and that is what matters in the end.

Ajani Goldmane - It feels to me like this is here solely because of the fun that goes with activating his ultimate since a planeswalker that gains life is decidedly meh and you're not really playing a creature-based deck enough to play him for the Anthem-like effect. If you wanted to play Serra Avatar you should just do that instead. It'll work better and now thanks to being reprinted in Magic 2013 it's no longer a price issue that suggests card availability is the problem.

Second Thoughts - I suspect your reasoning behind this revolves around the phrase 'draw a card' attached to it and we can do better than that. You need your pinpoint removal to be as cheap as possible so that you can use it almost as an afterthought while advancing your own game plan which is why I often find myself suggesting cards like Slaughter PactSubmerge and Snuff Out as my protection spells of choice but here you have access to one-mana non-negotiable removal and would be better off relying on that anyway.

There are simply better ways to go about drawing cards; even if this is conceptually on-theme that doesn't mean it's the right on-theme addition. I really don't want to come across as harsh here because I actually have been thinking about finding a home for this card in decks lately. It's not that I don't think it's a good card. I simply think it's not the right fit for this deck while it might be perfectly fine in other decks that are more reactive and thus more prone to leaving a lot of mana untapped anyway in the first place. You have a highly proactive game plan and that doesn't include leaving five untapped just in case.

Allay - I strongly approve of both Shattering Pulse and Allay in Commander but in this case it's another good stuff utility card not something that you actually need or which fits in with your plan of action. You're not actually a controlling deck you're a proactive board presence deck so having a card advantage answer to a specific subclass of permanents isn't that high of a priority.

IN:

Survival Cache - When I saw you had a life gain-based commander and a card-drawing theme I completely missed the first time around since I couldn't possibly contemplate this card not being in your deck already. Apparently it wasn't however as I found on the third pass through. Now it is because it's the white version of Divination for card drawing. It will always work so long as you're not at the absolute lowest life total at the table and lowest by more than a point since you can choose any of your opponents and just have to be higher than one of them not all. White has to work harder for its card draw but for doing so you get a few extra life points to work with as an added bonus.

Enlightened Tutor - You already have a significantly artifact-heavy plan of action and you're trying to assemble combos so that you can capitalize on awesome things happening due to intentional overlap of cards. Adding in Enlightened Tutor will help with that and considering we're going to add in a whole lot more combos this will help make sure you can find the right missing piece and put it to work. I know there's a trend lately going around like the flu to cut Tutors out of decks so that you draw more naturally and have more fun instead of unfun hyper-consistent broken decks. I also know there's a lot of hate on Mirage tutors—I've helped contribute to it even since I tend to cut them from decks and not make a big issue of the fact that most decks just don't want to go down a card if they can help it. But in this case the benefits far outweigh the costs and this will be a welcome addition to this deck.

Proclamation of Rebirth - This one's got to be a weird one to see sticking out here without any context so I'll simply say that the cards you probably think are added to go with this most likely are. See you in the creatures section!

Second SunriseFaith's Reward - No you can't go full-on Second Breakfast on anyone but you can get a lot of benefit from these as part of your regular game plan. They protect your board full of combos from opponents who want to break those combos up and can potentially do awesome stuff proactively with your Bauble-like cantrips the fetchlands and Ghost Quarter that were added and most especially with the Ashnod's Altar you're already playing. They're good both as protection and for your own use proactively and I think you'll appreciate the fact that with intelligent use and careful planning they get considerably better rewarding skill and strategy while also potentially just being an awesome way to draw a whole lot of cards off your small effects. 'Drawing cards however possible' was on your achievements list and in the setup you're already showing they do that quite well.

We now owe two slots and that's only going to get worse before it gets better because we're moving on to the creature section where we take that debt up to five cards total and stuff all of these future promises to the artifacts section of the deck for streamlining. We'll get there when we get there and I still can't believe I'm not cutting the Ashnod's Altar so that the deck isn't actually capable of ever assembling an infinite combo. But the justification I'm using is we're actually just adding in even more combos so there will be a lot of pull in different directions and maybe if there's 'infinity' involved it will at least be fun when it happens instead of a yawn-tastic borefest. (And still: if you can't break up a combo that's vulnerable to your choice of Disenchant or Lightning Bolt at a table of four players the other three players deserve to lose.)

OUT:

Leonin Shikari – We're actually going to undermine the equipment theme of the deck or at least the equipment theme that's really responsive to Leonin Shikari because there's value from moving the equipment about at instant speed. We're cutting the good stuff equipment so that means taking out the good-with-good-stuff Shikari while we're at it.

Leonin Relic-Warder - Another good stuff utility addition though this one does potentially have fun combo-like interactions with your other parts of the deck that let you do interesting stuff with sacrifice outlets and other shenanigans. Ultimately the space was needed for more on-point additions so that's where we're going instead.

Emeria Angel - It's true that Emeria Angel is awesome with Skullclamp but Skullclamp is just awesome with Skullclamp so we don't need to make the extra hoops something you endeavor to jump through. This is another good stuff card that doesn't fit the new shape of the deck even though it's definitely a good card. Good cards don't advance your position or develop your game plan they're just solid pieces of cardboard that contextually fit the theme of 'what is good to do in Commander.' We need to do better than that here.

Luminous Angel - If I didn't like this effect at four mana I'm not going to like it better at seven.

We have seven additions to go back in and we have forecast that our forecast card might want for targets if it's to make any sense whatsoever. That means there's going to be something of a one-drop theme to a few of the additions since I have never heard of the Proclamation / Weathered Wayfarer 'combo' which means we need other halves to work with that part. Goofy cards most certainly may apply however unlike in other walks of Magical life so things I would never play with a straight face in 40- or 60-card decks may fit into this one's 99. These additions will all fit neatly with the Nim Deathmantle aspect so they have multiple pieces they'll interact with some of which are more easily found than a random sorcery you have no way whatsoever to search for.

IN:

Martyr of Sands - I am chronically allergic to life gain. I would never play Martyr / Proclamation in Constructed but it fits here (and my allergy to life gain has been noted to be something I can get over if the number is large enough and the plan can be repetetive which this clearly fits the guidelines for). Martyr + Proclamation or Martyr + Nim Deathmantle is going to lead to a consistent life boost every turn especially if that Reliquary Tower is keeping your hand size above seven and we might potentially be talking 20 or 30 points a pop.

Kami of False Hope - This one is potentially cute rather than effective but it uses all of the same moving parts as the Martyr side does and gives them additional things to work with that are similar enough in nature since recurring Kami-powered Fogs can keep the table off your back reasonably enough. And one or both of these may cause an actually amusing level of frustration from the people who are trying to kill you which is the only kind of frustration I think is good to have in Commander. It teaches people to think outside of the box in deckbuilding and during game play and forces them into interacting in unusual ways as a necessity of the format rather than a curiosity that happens sometimes. If either of these one-mana 1/1s ruins someone's day that's entirely acceptable and a lesson you can teach in good conscience.

Serra Ascendant - Not quite 'combo piece with Proclamation of Rebirth' but it does fit some of the pieces and is just an awesome card for your deck with its life gain subfocus. If it just so happens that you haven't found the above two and you're stuck with a Proclamation in hand that feels useless and this card can be returned to play to grind the opponents out with a big fat lifelinked flier so much the better.

Ranger of Eos - I like Ranger with just Serra Ascendant and Weathered Wayfarer and in this case it adds your combo piece-y one-drops to the possible search candidates and helps assemble the goofier side of your combos. I consider him eminently playable with just three targets and you have four so he'll do quite nicely. I can even envision weird interactions where you get to replicate Land Tax somewhat to go with your Scroll Rack if you happen to have Ranger and Nim Deathmantle plus something helping the Ranger die be it 'blocking' or a sac outlet. Enough positive interactions to want to include it and there's just a flavorful hint of the weird going on to keep us interested instead of calling it just a good stuff addition.

Preacher - Speaking of sacrifice outlets this color-skewed curiosity is another worthy addition that's part self-defense and potentially part grindy card advantage plan if for example you're sending out your Preacher on the street corners of the Trading Post to turn your opponent's choice of nominees into rebuys of Origin Spellbomb or something. While it feels slightly off from the focus it's another solid defensive replacement to make up for the fact that I cut Second Thoughts and did not present a similarly functional card to replace it with and it will add interesting flavors when combined with your existing combo elements.

Argivian Archaeologist - I like finding old cards from yesteryear and giving them new homes and that urge continues here by presenting to you the Argivian Archaeologist which isn't nearly as expensive as you might expect for an obscure at-the-time beloved 'power card' from the early days of Magic. You're going to have an artifact recursion theme as you evinced with the Auriok Salvagers and this can do some of the same work thus letting us double up on the cards that work beneficially in the way that you desire.

We're also about to add a whole lot of cards that really like other things very much like themselves in order to function properly which Archaeologist will let you return but Salvagers would not and in this case Argivian Archaeologist allows you to keep those elements in play despite an opponent trying to take them off the table. The same instincts that suggest Second Sunrise may be potentially useful to maintain that presence on the board suggests Argivian Archaeologist will be a worthy addition and considering that I remember in the ancient yesteryears of Magic this being a $30 to $40 obscure rare never played in Vintage but nevertheless 'demanding' a fancy price tag.

Kozilek Butcher of Truth - You said you like card draw and wanted to find many ways to do so. Kozilek is one of the many ways to do so and considering some of the shenanigans we're doing with this deck I think the addition of at least one way to shuffle your graveyard back into your deck for later reuse might be beneficial. I like having one Eldrazi in most of my Commander decks and in this case Kozilek fits nicely with your Maro-sorcerer commander at the helm and strong desire to reuse spent combo pieces that have been handled already.

We move lastly to the artifacts section of your deck: the most expansive with 35 presently equal in size to the number of lands you're playing. We owe five slots however to other sections of the deck which means we're going to end up with 30 instead and need to streamline. I've also hinted at kookiness and not yet come through with the really interesting bits where we get to see the kinds of madness that you can get up to if you're left mischievously to your own devices.

I want to see Kiyomaro with a nineteenth-century robber-baron caricature moustache up to no good in silly and entirely preventable ways where 'assembling some oddball combo' is your version of tying the hero's romantic interest to the railroad tracks. They totally have an entire long action sequence scene to do something about it and save the day but if this totally ridiculous thing works out as planned well that's game boys. We want more of a Dr. Evil approach than a Scott Evil approach and when you see the things that are going back in all will be revealed.

OUT:

Infiltration Lens – You're playing this for a card draw ability that frankly it doesn't really possess. The ability to put cards in your hand when you want them is sorely lacking and because of this utter lack of efficiency it's time to show this the door.

Mask of Memory – Quite a solid little card for drawing extras and filtering through to improve the quality of your hand but you're not really creature-heavy enough to support all the equipment you have so some of them are ending up cut. This is one of them.

Carnage Altar – As noted you're a little creature-light so card drawing that specifically converts creatures into cards in hand has a limited utility. There's the best-case scenario of drawing it with token makers and building up your hand but even then it's not efficient at its job and not really worth the cardboard you're spending on it.

Sunbeam Spellbomb – Being a Bauble isn't good enough to keep something around for. You can have better Baubles than this and we'll substitute one in directly.

Venser's Journal – I don't think you need to commit quite this hard to the unlimited hand size aspect you're building in here and as far as life gain goes we've added Proclamation / Martyr of Sands. We're going to do this on a more industrialized scale so this can be replaced.

Teferi's Puzzle Box – It has the potential to help you search for different parts of different combos but it doesn't really help you.

Anvil of Bogardan – Another card that while it technically helps put cards through your hand doesn't actually help you. We don't want to share the card draw we want to maximize it for ourselves and both this and the Puzzle Box provide symmetrical effects that can very easily help the opponents more than it helps you.

Library of Leng – We don't need all these Spellbook effects and since we've added a few more lines of play that lead to finding and playing Reliquary Tower (Ranger for Wayfarer Enlightened Tutor for Expedition Map) I can cut this confident that you'll still have access to an unlimited hand size if that's what you want but not have so many repeating copies of the same effect that you're wasting cards to get this marginal effect.

Darksteel Plate – Good in theory replaced for dramatic effect... Waaaaaait for it...

Moonsilver Spear – Just a pure good stuff addition because it gives you some way to profit and develop the board. It doesn't actually advance your game plan and let's face it your original decklist had ten equipment cards and seventeen creatures—the balance was just off. We're cutting the least effective ones which brings us to...

Sword of Body and Mind – Another good stuff addition because you can potentially mill someone out with the Sword but it's not even the right second Sword for your deck. I'd wantSword of Light and Shadow as another recursion effect with the one-drops and just to replicate the fact that it puts a card in your hand which is like drawing a card even if it's not exactly drawing a card. Barring that I'd want Sword of War and Peace for the life gain and bonus damage. As it is I think it's clear that Sword of Fire and Ice is the most on-theme and we can move on from there without having to play all that many equipment cards. We'll be adding more back in your Puresteel Paladin will still trigger about as often but the ones we're adding in will potentially be a combo in and of themselves regardless of whether you have any creatures in play to go with them.

Whispersilk Cloak – Sure it's fine on your commander to get it through unblocked and un-Mazed but it's really not necessary. I'm very harsh on this card in Commander though I know it is well loved but I simply haven't seen it obtain good results.

With five vacancies already filled in the other sections that leaves us seven slots to fill the deck up with and we add in the following:

Conjurer's Bauble – A little bit of recursion or protection of spent resources never hurts and while it's highly unlikely you'll ever be able to combo off with this and Second Sunrise / Faith's Reward to recur those effects for later play the potential to do so is intriguing and gives you an angle I like even if we don't want to commit so heavily to the concept that suddenly we're adding Lion's Eye Diamond or Lotus Bloom to attempt to go infinite. Semi-comboing over several turns will still be powerful and this helps retain destroyed copies of any of the following combo pieces.

Sword Shield and Helm of Kaldra – Not every combo you assemble has to be offensive. Some can be cute but still surprisingly effective especially since assembling Kaldra alongside your Ashnod's Altar technically gives you infinite mana: one to make Kaldra appear two for eating Kaldra repeat as needed. Just having an omnipresent 9/9 that can kill anything it touches and which secretly has vigilance (make a second copy and they die to the legend rule make a third copy and it comes into play untapped!) so you can serve the beats with your 9/9 and still defend. Commander games often are grinds and assembling Kaldra is tough to get through for creature-based decks while nine a turn is hard to ignore.

Summoning Station – A free source of token creatures once you get past the seven mana one-time investment. Considering how fast you and potentially others can cycle through artifacts this can make quite a few creatures each turn but in actuality we're looking to assemble The Great Machine...

Grinding Station – A little bit of dead weight on its own but combined with the other four (one of which you already felt was worth including on its own merits tapping to buy back trinkets that have been used up) it's part of an endlessly cycling machine that mills each opponent to death while also dealing them infinite damage. Assembling the Great Machine is something you just don't see very often so even if it's sort of trite to assemble an infinite combo and suddenly kill the entire table it's hard enough to do and the cards are so narrow otherwise that it's really hard for someone to take it the wrong way. It's just difficult to strive for and awesome if you get there which I took to be the kind of feeling you wanted with Kiyomaro assembling combos through unexpected means.

Putting it all together we get the following combo-rific engine of overlapping synergies and accidentally oops-you're-dead moments when unexpected combos fire off:

As always for your participation in this week's edition of Dear Azami you will receive a $20 coupon to StarCityGames.com. Sometimes these come in cheaply and sometimes they don't; I tend to quietly hope perhaps too optimistically that everyone who plays Commander with any regularity has a Kozilek so I don't have to feel guilty about the ever-increasing price tag that comes with it.

After the Kozilek Enlightened Tutor and Argivian Archaeologist I was feeling really price-sensitive which is why I didn't take the present opportunity to advocate for finding and adding a Sensei's Divining Top to literally any Commander deck. If you have one or can afford one it's well worth the investment as it's the first nonland card in every Commander deck even before Sol Ring. After all some people don't roll that way or maybe they only play colored mana symbols and colorless doesn't help—who knows. But everyone plays cards.

Here are the additions with their associated prices at the online store:

CARD:

PRICE:

Kami of False Hope

$0.25

Survival Cache

$0.25

Bant Panorama

$0.39

Conjurer's Bauble

$0.39

Esper Panorama

$0.39

Ghost Quarter

$0.39

Grasslands

$0.39

Grinding Station

$0.39

Mistveil Plains

$0.39

Naya Panorama

$0.39

Urza's Mine

$0.39

Urza's Power Plant

$0.39

Urza's Tower

$0.39

Flood Plain

$0.65

Summoning Station

$0.75

Martyr of Sands

$0.89

Faith's Reward

$1.99

Blasting Station

$2.25

Ranger of Eos

$2.99

Sword of Kaldra

$2.99

Helm of Kaldra

$3.49

Shield of Kaldra

$3.49

Serra Ascendant

$4.49

Preacher

$4.99

Proclamation of Rebirth

$4.99

Thawing Glaciers

$5.99

Second Sunrise

$7.99

Enlightened Tutor

$13.99

Argivian Archaeologist

$14.99

Kozilek Butcher of Truth

$24.99

Having apparently covered three mono-colored decks in a row the kind of trend I tend to pay attention to long before it happens I'm aching for a nice multicolored deck. Last week Cassidy covered Progenitus which is two more colors in one article than I've covered in the last three. We must keep up with the Joneses or in this case the McAuliffes since he actually hasn't covered a mono-colored Commander yet. We'll just have to switch roles and it'll be my turn to pick based on all of the colors instead of try to fill out the roles with a mono-black and mono-green deck just to complete the cycle. (Been forever since I've seen a mono-brown deck too at that...)

Want to submit a deck for consideration to Dear Azami? We're always accepting deck submissions to consider for use in a future article like Eric's Progenitus deck or Jether's Mistform Ultumus deck. Only one deck submission will be chosen per article but being selected for the next edition of Dear Azamiincludes not just deck advice but also a $20 coupon to StarCityGames.com!

Like what you've seen? Feel free to explore more of "Dear Azami" here!Feel free to follow Sean on Facebook. Sometimes there are extra surprises and bonus content to be found over on his Facebook Fan Page as well as previews of the next week's column at the end of the week! Follow Cassidy on his Facebook page here or check out his Commander blog: GeneralDamageControl.com!